Tuesday, August 28, 2007

On our trip out west this week, Liz, Traci and I stayed at a ranch in Montana. No – we did not get to stay with the Pioneer Woman and join in the cow pregnancy testing fun, but we did stay with some very nice ranchers in Eastern Montana named Willy and Anne. That’s right! When I called and found out Mrs. Rancher’s first name was Anne with an “e” I knew we’d hit the jackpot.

We flew into Denver, picked up our lovely white rental car (laugh all you want, Brian) and headed north toward Montana. As is typical with the Anne/Liz road trip, we got caught in several torrential downpours and a couple of hail storms. But we forged our way through the road kill splattered, partially paved roads of Wyoming to cross into Montana and arrive at the ranch a little after 9pm.

I was relieved when Mrs. Rancher told us she would have breakfast ready at 7:30. That meant I could easily get 8 hours of sleep which we were all in desperate need of since we'd gotten up at 4:30 eastern time that morning to get to the airport. So it was off to bed for a great night's sleep under the big Montana sky.

Fast forward to 4:37 am the next morning. Cockadoodle-doo!! Actually it was more of a Ca-cock-a-doo! I remember thinking "Wow, it's still really dark outside! I thought the rooster crowed when the sun came up." Little did I know that the rooster comes with a snooze button. The Pioneer Woman never mentioned that one. He crowed every few minutes for the next hour and a half. What's up with that rooster???

I considered my options and thought about throwing shoes at him out the window, or looking for a baseball bat, but I decided my best option was to pray. I prayed that that rooster would be content with number of times he had already crowed to the Lord that morning, and I asked the Lord to reveal to him that we had come from a different time zone and his crows were confusing us more than helping us, and maybe he could find it in his little rooster heart to allow us to get another hour of sleep. And I kid you not – a few minutes after those prayers were lifted up to heaven I truly believed that rooster (it was later that we found out there were multiple roosters) had cockadoodle-doo’d his last. I was literally thanking Jesus like nobody's business every minute that went by without a crow. But it turns out he decided to take a 7 minute break instead of 3. And he was with us the rest of the morning until the sun finally came up.

There is one positive thing that came out of my morning hours with the rooster. This scene (which is one of my favorites from Arrested Development) kept running through my head:

Lindsay's chicken is the best!

Other than the rooster, the time at the ranch was great! Here are some of my favorite pics:

The tractor pic (taken for my Dad):

The cabin (right next to the hen house, of course):

Our cow friends:My favorite cow pic (she doesn't come close to the Pioneer Woman's Ursula, but I still love her):

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